DFINY founder accuses NEAR Intents of using its proprietary threshold signature technology

DFINTIY founder Dominic Williams (@dominic_w) posted on X stating that the key components relied upon by NEAR's Chain Abstraction and Intents utilize the threshold ECDSA algorithm from a paper published by DFINITY in 2022. He stated that the technology was only licensed for use on the Internet Computer, and accused NEAR of recruiting former employees fired by DFINITY in 2021 to lead the relevant work. He further claimed that the algorithm can triple signing speeds compared to other solutions. Williams also questioned the degree of decentralization of NEAR, noting that its related system operates on only 8 servers, while the corresponding solution for the Internet Computer runs on subnets comprising around 50 independent node operators. Citing pull request #4503 and issue #4324 in the NEAR MPC repository on GitHub, he stated that NEAR is attempting to downgrade from a 1-round signing scheme to a slower 3-round scheme. Williams indicated that the matter involves legal considerations, asserting that DFINITY would be willing to share the technology under fair terms if NEAR had sought collaboration beforehand and properly attributed the technology's origin. At present, the post contains only one-sided allegations, with no response yet seen from NEAR, and the related claims have not yet...